This present conversation (transcribed by Christopher Raguz) focuses on Rivera Garza’s novel The Taiga Syndrome (translated by Suzanne Jill Levine and Aviva Kana). Rivera Garza is the author of six novels, three collections of short stories, five collections of poetry, and three nonfiction books. The recipient of the France-based Roger Caillois Award for Latin American Literature as well as of the Germany-based Anna Seghers Prize, she is also the only author who has won the International Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize twice (in 2001 for her novel Nadie me verá llorar, and in 2009 for her novel La muerte me da).
As a writer, my personal responsibility, my job so to speak, is to carefully examine (question, subvert, transform, challenge) each of these tools available to me depending on the various language communities that I share my life with. These are the tools of my trade, the only aspects of my work as a writer over which I have some kind of control. It is my responsibility to know them in as intimate a manner as possible. And you can do that, I believe, from the point of view of the mother tongue (an intimacy yielded by familiarity), or from the perspective of the second language (an intimacy brought about through hypervigilance). Both experiences are fundamental in the writing process, and both depend heavily in my case on translation — the unending, constant, inescapable translation process embedded in everything we do (even if we are officially monolingual).
